Stern asks us to reconsider the photograph as more than an image—a physical object that demands to be experienced in person. In an era where most pictures exist digitally, fleetingly viewed on screens before disappearing into the endless scroll, this exhibition calls for a return to presence and materiality.
Photographs today often live as detritus, stored on our iPhones or uploaded to cloud servers, stripped of their physicality. Simultaneously, galleries have moved away from showing photography, contributing to its relegation to the digital realm. This show pushes back against that trend, celebrating the photograph as an object that carries weight, texture, and a story that cannot be fully conveyed through pixels on a screen.
The works in Polaroids, Small Prints and Ephemera demonstrate the richness of engaging with photography in its tangible form. Polaroids, with their instant and singular nature, offer intimacy and immediacy. Small prints, demanding close inspection, pull us into their details and evoke a sense of quiet discovery and ephemera— those peripheral elements like handwritten notes, creased paper, or torn edges—remind us that photographs are as much about the context of their creation as the image itself.
This exhibition is an invitation to experience photographs as they were meant to be seen: in person, where their material presence and physical nuances resonate deeply. It is a call to value photography as more than a fleeting digital record, to re-engage with its potential to preserve, provoke, and endure. In doing so, Polaroids, Small Prints and Ephemera underscores photography’s role not only as art but as an artifact of human connection and memory.
Daniel Arnold, Gray Sorrenti, Laurel Thoma, Irina Rozovsky, Jerry Hsu, Mike Brodie, Chris Rhodes, Mario Sorrenti, Jeremy Everett, Juan Brenner, Dexter Navy, Laura Jane Coulson, Alexa Chung and Vince Aletti.
